Baby Girl Flyweight

By Seth Kabala

Ascending the stairs was a step in the midst of an efficiently-engineered process.

The man of medium height and build, except for large forearms and bulging shoulders he couldn’t quite explain, left the main floor bathroom, walked through the kitchen and halfway through the living room to reach the stairs, then ascended to the second floor. The main floor bathroom contained only a shower, while the upstairs bathroom contained only a toilet, sink, and mirror, and since the only one of those that sprayed water with decent pressure also doubled as a waste disposal device, he was forced to take his shower in the main floor bathroom and then hustle upstairs wearing a towel to finish the morning routine.

He thought about the builder’s planning process when deciding on the layout of the home, deciding the only way things made sense was–they printed out stickers with the names of various rooms, assigning each a random number from one through however many rooms were in the house. Then they played Labyrinth. If the ball fell in the fifth hole on the first run, the room with that number was assigned the first, front-most position in the house, and so on until all the holes had received the ball and all the rooms had been assigned positions, however illogical. If that wasn’t it, they were just plain crazy, he thought.

The man had OCD tendencies, going as far as counting the major actions it took to go from waking to dressed, numbering and timing these–putting on his flip-flops, yawning, stretching, airing out the pressure build-up in his spine, feeling for the end of the oak handrail, watching for the supports that held said handrail to the wall to ensure he didn’t smash his fingers as he felt his way along, descending the stairs, reaching for the brass doorknob, sweeping his hand up to flip on the light switch, and so on–with the goal of creating a repeatable process.

He felt he was well on his way to publishing the results of his self-funded efficiency study. Then the growth appeared, and his carefully-timed process slowed faster than a fat man after breaking into a five-second run.

* * *

Whenever I emerge from our main floor bathroom and start to ascend the stairs, our youngest, Ella, our fireworks-warehouse-dropped-in-a-match-factory three-year-old, bolts from whatever she’s doing and rockets ahead of me. She has to be upstairs while I’m up there getting ready for the day. Her presence is welcome, though it makes for interesting management of modesty. Ok, she’s in the hallway, so I have five seconds to switch out this towel for my underwear.

She messes around, singing and jumping off all objects strong enough to support her weight, which is everything. One of her favorite activities is jumping on the bed, which she is genetically wired to do. Instead of regular jumps with her body resembling an upright, rigid pole, she practices for a future career as a WWE star, kicking her feet out, throwing her shoulders back until her body is parallel to the bed, slamming down on the bed backside-broadside, and snapping up with enough springing momentum to continue the self-body-slam cycle.

As Dad, I am obligated to tell her to be careful.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m not breaking myself.”

Right, I think. Someone else will be the recipient of that someday.

When I’ve finished putting on my work attire and sheen of awesomeness, she–usually while I’m bent over tying my shoes. You know, the best position to preserve the integrity of my spine–launches herself at me and lands on my back, holding on with bench-vice strength, as though she is grafted in place, and she refuses to let go until I’ve hauled her downstairs, treads and knees creaking the whole way.

I have three takeaways from this:

1. I need to check out my network to see how many degrees away from Vince McMahon I am so I can start buttering him up (or his likely successor, since he’ll be dead soon) to increase Ella’s chances of getting in as a performer serious athlete.

2. The lead for this started out as semi-fiction, but that repeatable process is sounding smart.